How Can I Help You

This is a hard book to rate/explain, but here goes.

Margo and Patricia are both librarians at a small public library branch in the Chicago 'burbs. Margo arrived earlier in the year than Patricia, and was a nurse prior to her (forced) career change. You see, (and this is all in the first chapter, so not a spoiler), 'Margo' is not Margo at all, and is instead a persona she created to distance herself from all the patients she killed at previous jobs. Now she's a librarian trying not to draw attention to herself, trying to acclimate to a job where people don't come in sick and reliant upon her to keep them alive, trying and sort of failing at keeping these intrusive thoughts at bay. Patricia is a failed writer trying a career change into something more reliable, trying and failing to resist the urge to write, trying to appease her loser of a boyfriend she doesn't seem to like too much. But when Margo starts behaving strangely at the library, she starts writing this down, and unwittingly turning Margo into a character for one of her books. She starts watching Margo closely, and by extension, starts drawing closer to Margo's truth.

The story is told from each of their viewpoints, and both are unreliable narrators, and also pretty unlikeable. 'Margo' is unlikeable just by merit of being a serial killer, but also because she has some pretty savage things she thinks about the patrons who come into her library (and admittedly that hits close to home). Patricia is unlikeable for folding like a lawn chair when her boyfriend tells her that basically everything she does is terrible, for stringing said boyfriend along for so long, for being so adverse to the idea of writing, and for (late story spoilers here) never turning Margo in, despite all the things she discovers about her. But unlikeable characters are sort of the point of this story, as a feature, not a bug. Most of this story wouldn't work if people behaved as they should, because this is a story about two liars, not just one.

I think my only hangup about this book was the ending. (ending spoilers here) I thought, for all the buildup we got between Margo and Patricia, I was expecting more of an explosive finale. And while the building burning down is, by definition, explosive, the actual dispute was over so abruptly. I don't know, for all of the slow burn, I feel like the ending should have been a bit more satisfying. I did like how the author turned Patricia into another Margo at the end, though. That was a really nice twist.

So, a great story marred by not sticking the landing. It's a slow burn, not quite action-packed, but psychological enough that I was entertained throughout.